Hi and thanks for visiting the best Ravens forum on the planet. You do not have to be a member to browse the various forums, but in order to post and interact with your purple brethren, you will have to **register**. It only takes a couple of minutes. You can also use your Facebook account to log in....just click on the blue 'FConnect' link at the very top of the page.

Billick makes shocking new claim about Dilfer on NFL.com!

Billick in this article tries to justify his firing Dilfer using the usual reasons we've all heard a hundred times, Dilfer was not "elite", Billick wanted to "upgrade the quarterback position" and so on. Nothing new there.

What is new and very important is the bolded part of the following passage from Billick's article:

Obviously [Dilfer] is a championship-caliber quarterback, but I don't think people would argue him to be elite. I surely didn't. It was my opinion that I needed to upgrade the quarterback position if I wanted to repeat. Keep in mind that during the title season we failed to score an offensive touchdown in a five-game span in which we lost three of those five games. If we couldn't create more offensive opportunity, not only would we not repeat, but we would struggle to even make the playoffs.

It's obvious reading this that Billick is blaming Dilfer for the "five game span in which we lost three of those five games."

There's just one slight problem with Billick's theory - Dilfer was installed as starting quarterback after the previous QB had lost the three games and gone 5-3. Dilfer lost his first game, his only Ravens loss, then went on his 11 game winning streak, outscoring opponents 288-90, with only one game decided by less than 10 points.

Billick is referring to the five game span including Week 5 versus the Browns (Ravens 12-0); Week 6 versus the Jaguars (Ravens 15-10); Week 7 versus the Redskins (Redskins 10-3); Week 8 versus the Titans (Titans 14-6) and Week 9 versus the Steelers (Steelers 9-6). Ravens scored no TDs, true, and lost three, true as well. But Dilfer only started one of those five games, the last one, before his winning streak started.

It wasn't Dilfer at all who "failed to score an offensive touchdown in a five game span" - that was the prior starting quarterback (Banks) for four of the games! But if you read the sentence carefully, Billick is saying he did what he had to do to replace a quarterback who lost three out of five games. That's not Dilfer!

There are only two possibilities, and both are nearly unbelievable:

(A) Billick is intentionally lying about Dilfer to the NFL.com audience, most of whom are not at all familiar with the 2000 season or exactly what Dilfer did. Billick figures he can get away with it, since non-Ravens fans don't know the truth and most Ravens fans don't seem to care.

(B) Billick actually believes that Dilfer went five games without an offensive touchdown and lost three games.

If (A) is true, then Billick is just a liar, trying to slander Dilfer in order to bolster his own standing. But really, why would Billick do that? It doesn't make much sense to embellish the Dilfer firing like that - he could just have criticized Dilfer's ability directly - non-Ravens fans don't know anything about Dilfer, and most Ravens fans already agree Dilfer was not "elite."

So it doesn't make much sense for Billick to lie.

But if Billick is not lying, then Billick thought Dilfer had lost those games. Option (A) is false, so option (B) must be true. Billick actually believes it was Dilfer, not Banks, who lost the three games and went five games without a TD. And that, more than anything else, might finally explain the real reason Billick fired Dilfer in 2001.

What if Billick, after a busy season with a busy lifestyle, maybe drinking a bit too much celebratory champagne, got confused and literally forgot that Dilfer had only been the starter since game 9 of the season? What if Billick thought Dilfer was so poor offensively because Billick was blaming Dilfer for losses in games that Dilfer didn't play in at all? It sounds absurd, but, as Holmes said, when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Billick has no reason to lie, so he should believe he is telling the truth - which means he believes Dilfer, not Banks, lost those games.

It's amazing to think that everything the Ravens and Dilfer went through since the firing could have been due just to a confused head coach - but the words are in black and white: Billick wrote them, not me.

[Every time I mention Dilfer, I get a chorus of people saying he's not relevant, etc. But this post is obviously relevant because the Billick article just came out a few days ago, on a widely read site. And Billick gives extraordinary new insight into why Dilfer was fired - a reason that had never before appeared in print. So this post and the Billick article are absolutely relevant to the Ravens.]

tl;dr:Billick writes article on NFL.com wrongly implying Dilfer had three losses in five straight games without a TD. Four of those games actually had Banks as a starter, not Dilfer. Billick is confused (or lying) about which losses were due to Dilfer and which to Banks. If Billick wasn't lying, then this could explain why Billick fired Dilfer: Billick thought Banks' losses were actually due to Dilfer.

Explanation 3: Billick was condensing an explanation of our offensive struggles into an article with a word limit that was almost certainly edited by a professional editor with no affiliation with the team who may have decided to condense a few sentences for ease of reading without realizing that he was creating a misleading sentence.

Billick in this article tries to justify his firing Dilfer using the usual reasons we've all heard a hundred times, Dilfer was not "elite", Billick wanted to "upgrade the quarterback position" and so on. Nothing new there.

What is new and very important is the bolded part of the following passage from Billick's article:

It's obvious reading this that Billick is blaming Dilfer for the "five game span in which we lost three of those five games."

There's just one slight problem with Billick's theory - Dilfer was installed as starting quarterback after the previous QB had lost the three games and gone 5-3. Dilfer lost his first game, his only Ravens loss, then went on his 11 game winning streak, outscoring opponents 288-90, with only one game decided by less than 10 points.

It wasn't Dilfer at all who "failed to score an offensive touchdown in a five game span" - that was the prior starting quarterback (Banks)! But if you read the sentence carefully, Billick is saying he did what he had to do to replace a quarterback who lost three out of five games. That's not Dilfer!

There are only two possibilities, and both are nearly unbelievable:

(A) Billick is intentionally lying about Dilfer to the NFL.com audience, most of whom are not at all familiar with the 2000 season or exactly what Dilfer did. Billick figures he can get away with it, since non-Ravens fans don't know the truth and most Ravens fans don't seem to care.

(B) Billick actually believes that Dilfer went five games without an offensive touchdown and lost three games.

If (A) is true, then Billick is just a liar, trying to slander Dilfer in order to bolster his own standing. But really, why would Billick do that? It doesn't make much sense to embellish the Dilfer firing like that - he could just have criticized Dilfer's ability directly - non-Ravens fans don't know anything about Dilfer, and most Ravens fans already agree Dilfer was not "elite."

So it doesn't make much sense for Billick to lie.

But if Billick is not lying, then Billick thought Dilfer had lost those games. Option (A) is false, so option (B) must be true. Billick actually believes it was Dilfer, not Banks, who lost the three games and went five games without a TD. And that, more than anything else, might finally explain the real reason Billick fired Dilfer in 2001.

What if Billick, after a busy season with a busy lifestyle, maybe drinking a bit too much celebratory champagne, got confused and literally forgot that Dilfer had only been the starter since game 9 of the season? What if Billick thought Dilfer was so poor offensively because Billick was blaming Dilfer for losses in games that Dilfer didn't play in at all? It sounds absurd, but, as Holmes said, when the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Billick has no reason to lie, so he should believe he is telling the truth - which means he believes Dilfer, not Banks, lost those games.

It's amazing to think that everything the Ravens and Dilfer went through since the firing could have been due just to a confused head coach - but the words are in black and white: Billick wrote them, not me.

[Every time I mention Dilfer, I get a chorus of people saying he's not relevant, etc. But this post is obviously relevant because the Billick article just came out a few days ago, on a widely read site. And Billick gives extraordinary new insight into why Dilfer was fired - a reason that had never before appeared in print. So this post and the Billick article are absolutely relevant to the Ravens.]

Re: Billick makes shocking new claim about Dilfer on NFL.com!

Originally Posted by ActualSpamBot

Explanation 3: Billick was condensing an explanation of our offensive struggles into an article with a word limit that was almost certainly edited by a professional editor with no affiliation with the team who may have decided to condense a few sentences for ease of reading without realizing that he was creating a misleading sentence.
---
I am here: http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=39.369088,-76.761208

You have a point, I should have mentioned this "editing error" theory.

After all, no matter what Billick (or anyone else) publishes, there's no way to prove with absolute mathematical certainty that some anonymous editor didn't change what he wrote.

However, the "editing error" theory turns out to be extraordinarily unlikely when you consider it carefully.

The main flaw in the "editing error" theory is implicit in your own comment:

Billick was condensing an explanation of our offensive struggles into an article...

But the Ravens offensive struggles prior to Dilfer's starting had nothing to do with the topic of the article. The topic of the article is about elite quarterbacks, and whether they are necessary. The article discusses QBs like Eli Manning, Peyton Manning, Trent Dilfer, and Alex Smith; and mentions in passing Rex Grossman, Ben Roethlisberger and Aaron Rodgers. The article's thesis is that "to be elite, you must lead your team to a Super Bowl championship, but just because you did, it doesn't make you elite."

So in the context of that article, it simply would not make sense to include a discussion of Tony Banks. To say "we had to upgrade our QB from Dilfer to Grbac because Tony Banks went four games without a TD" just makes no sense - and the article is focusing on why Dilfer had to be upgraded, not why Dilfer was a vast improvement over Banks.

More important, consider the "five game span without a touchdown" Billick mentioned. That span included four games started by Banks followed by one game started by Dilfer, (i.e., Dilfer's first start and the one game he lost that season). So the whole "five game span" phrase only makes sense if Billick is mixing up Dilfer's loss and Bank's losses. An editor wouldn't have just inserted this phrase.

If you don't believe this, try and concoct a plausible passage that makes sense in the context of the article (which is about why Dilfer was upgraded to Grbac) that an editor could have altered to read as it did.

In light of your comment, however, I did edit my original post to add the full list of the five games that were touchdown free that Billick is referring to. When you see this list, you see clearly that since Banks started the first four, and Dilfer started the fifth, there isn't any simple editing error that would make merging of the two QBs' records sensible. In talking about Dilfer, it just doesn't make sense to merge a Banks 4-game streak with a Dilfer 1-game streak and call that a 5-game streak, editing or no.

(If Billick really wants to try and blame the whole thing on his editor, he will have to post the original unedited version and, as I explained above, that's going to be awfully tough to do in a plausible way).

Hope this explanation and re-editing clarifies the reasoning - good point though, thanks for raising it.

Re: Billick makes shocking new claim about Dilfer on NFL.com!

Originally Posted by MarkS

1. Need to work on your english comprehension - he never said Dilfer was the QB during that 5 game stretch.

The claim is implied by the context. A paragraph that reads like "We had to upgrade from Dilfer. We went five games without a TD and had 3 losses" implies, in context, that it was Dilfer who had the losses. That's even more true in an article targeted to a broad audience at NFL.com of non-Ravens fans, must of whom have no idea that Dilfer replaced Banks midway through the season and had only one loss.

Re: Billick makes shocking new claim about Dilfer on NFL.com!

Ok, he wasn't trying to go out of his way and sully Dilfer's name. He was trying to say that Dilfer's season was viewed as the exception, not the rule.

I'm going to go out on a limb, and post a huge shocking theory, maybe it'll get me flamed...If Dilfer isn't inserted at QB, Banks still manages to break that scoreless streak vs the Bengals. Consider, during that streak, we failed to score TDs against the Redskins, Jaguars, Steelers, Titans, and Browns. The Redskins, Titans, and Steelers each had top 10 defenses. Jacksonville, had the #16 defense. The only strange one was the Browns, which had the 27th ranked defense. The first game where we scored a TD again was vs the Bengals, #21 defense. (All these ranks are in points allowed). The last game before the streak started was against the Bengals. We shut them out, 37-0.

I do not believe Banks would've gotten us to the Super Bowl. I think he was done as a QB. But as we saw with the Colts this year, even a scrub QB can win a game or two and score TDs. Billick felt that, in order to build a dynasty here, in order to have multiple shots to win Super Bowls, we needed to go with the rule, rather than the exception. Grbac was his first gamble as a head coach. Billick is always going to have that rock tied to his waist of drafting and sticking with Boller for too long, but you have to wonder if he got in the hole with trying to put Grbac out there and it backfiring. Once that move backfired, it was pretty clear we needed to build our offense through the draft, and within two years of the failed Grbac experiment, he made his big play with Boller.

One thing I'll always wonder is what could've happened if he pushed his chips in the pile with Redman at QB. We drafted Redman in 2000, but he just sat on the bench waiting. In 2002, he had a shot, floundered a little bit, but mostly had a back injury that kept him out half the year and saw us turning to Jeff Blake. In 2003, Brian brings Boller in and it was only a matter of time before he went with Boller. There was a sham of a QB competition which ended with Boller as the starter and put Redman in a funk he would never recover from here.

Am I saying that I thought Redman had the mustard to be an "elite QB"? Not necesarily, but we'll also never know. By the time he got back in the NFL, it was serving as the seat warmer for Matt Ryan.

.
.
“When I think of a Baltimore Raven - we go in there, we take your lunch box, we take your sandwich, we take your juice box, we take your applesauce, and we take your spork and we break it. And we leave you with an empty lunch. That’s the Baltimore Raven way.” - Steve Smith Sr.

Re: Billick makes shocking new claim about Dilfer on NFL.com!

Your tl;dr is still being subjective.

The correct thing would be to say "Billick, in his article trying to explain why he made a QB change, cited that the offense failed to score a TD in five straight games. The debate we are having is whether he attributes that streak to Dilfer as well, or was just trying to make a generalization."

.
.
“When I think of a Baltimore Raven - we go in there, we take your lunch box, we take your sandwich, we take your juice box, we take your applesauce, and we take your spork and we break it. And we leave you with an empty lunch. That’s the Baltimore Raven way.” - Steve Smith Sr.